About The Role:

At Materialize, engineering management means serving your team of engineers to create an environment that allows them to effectively work and evolve. Because the team has a mix of backgrounds and geographic locations, this role requires a balance of execution, adaptability, and empathy and the ability to lead across time zones.

You will work as part of the management team and report to the VP of Engineering. As the engineering manager for the storage team, you will directly contribute to the product and technology strategy of Materialize. You will be responsible for delivery of the storage team’s roadmap and the overall quality and health of the storage layer.

The Storage Team:

The storage team is distributed over Europe (CET) and Northern America (ET, PT).

The storage team’s mission is to allow customers to easily and reliably ingest and sink their data into and out of Materialize. Within Materialize, ingested data is available for consumption by other parts of the systems, such as our compute layer which powers indexes and materialized views.

The storage layer is critical for the overall performance and correctness of Materialize. Given the low-level nature of this layer, we expect our engineering managers to be fairly technical.

Engineering Management at Materialize:

Minimum Viable Process

People often join startups to get away from the heavyweight processes common at larger companies. We have recommendations for processes, but we only introduce them when there is a demonstrated need and value. We don’t require uniform processes across the company; team processes can be tailored towards the individual team situation.

Transparency

We highly value transparency across the organization. We default to working in the open (both on our codebase and within the company) and feel comfortable sharing incomplete thinking or works in progress with peers and our teams.

Candid, Continuous Feedback

We provide candid (and kind) feedback as quickly as we can. We don’t wait for 1-1s or big emergencies to happen.

Servant Leadership

Engineering leadership at Materialize is about being of service to your team. While managers have a lot of input into what the engineers do on a daily basis, this must be tempered with the engineers’ preferences, career goals, work/life balance, and growth goals.

Sound Technical Judgment

We expect engineering managers to exercise good engineering judgment while leaving core technical decisions to the experts on the team. Engineering managers’ technical judgment contributes to evaluating engineering trade offs, helping engineers grow, influencing roadmaps, and contributing to design discussions.

Responsibilities:

• Serve your team through coaching, mentoring, and management.
• Partner with our product team to ensure successful customer outcomes.
• Collaborate with peers and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure sustainable, effective delivery.
• Work with tech leads and senior engineers to develop technical roadmaps and to manage code quality.
• Partner with recruiting to create a hiring plan and source, screen, interview, and close engineering candidates.
• Foster a culture of execution, quality, and inclusivity.
• Grow the technical expertise and careers of your team members.
• Develop the essential processes and structure needed to predictably deliver a high-quality product.

About You:

• 2+ years of experience managing engineering teams of distributed systems and backend engineers.
• Experience managing a distributed team.
• Substantial hands on engineering experience with one or more of the following: distributed systems, databases, and data infrastructure.
• Bias towards executing quickly and iterating frequently.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to adapt to different development methodologies.
• Ability to create a sufficient but lightweight amount of process to help the team make progress.
• B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

Bonus points:

• Recent experience at a startup.
• Significant experience using SQL databases, Apache Kafka, or other data infrastructure.
• Background in creating data infrastructure, such as databases.
• Experience building high performance, high availability systems.
• Experience working on a SaaS data infrastructure product.